A Palestinian Voice in Gaza, A Review of Mosab Abu Toha’s “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear”

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s first poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (City Lights Books: San Francisco, California, 2022), published a year before the overwhelming violence begun in early October 2023, touches upon a range of Toha’s and fellow Palestinian’s memories and daily life experiences in Gaza before the COVID pandemic. This award-winning collection is poignant and unreserved without being melodramatic. Toha shows that despite how violence perniciously and relentlessly invades every aspect of life in Gaza, he and other Gazans somehow survive and live on—even those who’ve died and now live on through a shared history. His worthwhile poetry subsists within the tension between violent destruction and the will to survive. In “Searching for a New Exit,” he conflates these external and internal forces pressing upon him:

There is no light
to help me see
the boundaries of my state:
my nonexistent state.

The destructive political force blurs into the individual, and both are erased. Toha’s poetry resists erasure through its interruptions and echoes of life in Gaza, through its observations of both external and internal spaces, through his bare-boned lines and language, and ultimately through Toha’s emphasis on voice.

A ten-page poem of colored pictures, “Interlude” interrupts poetry as…